


crush on you

by maketea



Series: fictober 2019 [11]
Category: Miraculous Ladybug
Genre: Dorks in Love, Established Relationship, F/M, Fictober 2019, Fluff, Holding Hands, Post Reveal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-10-11
Updated: 2019-10-11
Packaged: 2020-12-09 11:10:21
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,364
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20993846
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/maketea/pseuds/maketea
Summary: adrien walks into marinette’s room, and— wow, that certainly is a lot of pictures of him.





	crush on you

**Author's Note:**

> fictober day 11: “it's not always like this.”

“Hey, Marinette!”

She froze.

Slowly, Marinette lowered her hand, the one holding a magazine spread of Adrien she had just untacked from her wall. Then, she turned around, careful not to knock over her computer or her keyboard or the accumulating pile of photographs next to her knee.

Adrien beamed at her from the hatchway.

Then they both looked at her carpet — or rather, what was  _ on _ her carpet.

At the least, there were thirty pictures of him strewn around with sticky tape still hanging off them. Surprisingly, they were all still immaculate — although Marinette had been taking them all down, it felt wrong to let any of his pictures tear. It  _ was  _ Adrien, after all. She wasn’t even going to throw them away, only put them in one of the big cardboard boxes she brought up to her room.

He stared at them for a minute, raised his eyebrows, then looked at her. “You’re redecorating?”

Marinette didn’t even try to get off her desk. “I swear it’s not always like this.”

Usually, the pictures were on her walls, but that didn’t really make it better. There was a normal amount of pictures someone should have of their boyfriend after two weeks of dating, and Marinette spat on normal and kicked it to the side a long, long time ago. Definitely more than two weeks ago, she could safely say.

So far, she’d been doing a rather good job at hiding her crush from him. She had changed her lockscreen from her favourite picture of him to a selfie of them both, and flicked through every single one of her notebooks and tore out all the pages she doodled his name in the margin. (She paid extra attention to the pages where  _ Marinette Agreste _ was scrawled shamelessly beneath her class notes).

All that was left was her room, and what better time for spring cleaning than a few hours before Adrien came over?

Evidently, any other time. She seemed to forget his habit of turning up early.

“That’s… a lot of pictures,” he said. Adrien pulled himself up through the hatch, bent down, and picked one up from the floor. “Whoa, this is from my first photoshoot! I didn’t think you could find this anywhere.”

Marinette squeezed her eyes shut. “Adrien?”

Smiling, he looked up.

“Put it down.”

“But it’s my face.”

“Put it  _ down _ .”

He dropped the photograph, and Marinette let out a long-held breath.

Then he picked out another. “This isn’t from a photoshoot.”

“Adrien, please.”

He turned it around to face her. It was their class photo from earlier that year. Marinette could barely distinguish herself from a nearby tree, but it didn’t take long for her to know where Adrien was. She had drawn a great pink love heart around him, and decorated it with an excessive amount of embarrassing stickers.

“I’m starting to think someone might’ve had a crush,” he observed.

“Adrien, I—” Marinette stopped, and glanced at the magazine spread still in her hands. Gingerly, she set it at the top of the Adrien pile, and clambered off her desk. “You weren’t supposed to know.”

“Why not? I think it’s adorable, and…” he trailed off, eyes drifting to another spot on the floor. “Is that… a picture of me and my father — with my father cropped out?”

Marinette dropped to her knees and gathered every picture she could into a heap in front of her. She turned each one facedown. “Okay, listen, I can explain—“

He watched her expectantly, eyebrows raised, smiling a little.

She stopped gathering. Marinette looked down at the heap, at the thirty-something photos of Adrien on the floor, knowing she still had more under her bed, tucked under her sewing machine — she hadn’t even touched her phone, yet.

“W-well, yeah,” she said. “I had a crush on you.”

The way she blushed was stupid. They liked each other — that much had been established when Chat Noir kissed her two weeks ago, after they revealed their identities. She shouldn’t be embarrassed  _ now _ .

But he wasn’t any better. The only difference was that Adrien was still smiling.

“I had a crush on you too,” he said.

“I  _ know _ , Adrien. You never really kept it a secret.”

Not from Ladybug, that was,

He chuckled, and, leaving the picture on the floor, came to sit beside Marinette. “How come you never told me?”

“I…” She couldn’t look at him, and instead busied herself with turning the photographs over. “I was too scared.”

“Scared? Why?”

Marinette bit her lip. She almost didn’t respond, almost sat there with her eyes squeezed shut again, and hoped that would make Adrien and his question disappear.

But burying her head in the sand would never work. A superheroine would never do that.

She fingered some tape sticking out of a picture. “I didn’t want you to reject me.”

Immediately, she wished she could go back and say something else. Marinette hated lies, but she might have made an exception for this in particular.

It wasn’t even what she said — it was how she said it: in that soft, sad tone she used to use with Tikki  _ before _ she knew Adrien was in love with her. That tone had no place here, between her and her boyfriend. It was the past, it had happened — it was silly to use that tone when they were dating already.

But it was embarrassing. Chat Noir could have shouted his feelings off Montparnasse Tower, while Marinette couldn’t even write a proper love letter.

“You must not think I’m very brave,” she said quietly.

Adrien looked at her bare walls, then at the pictures on the floor. “I was scared you’d reject me too, you know.”

She watched him out of the corner of her eye. “Really?”

“Well, yeah.” He shrugged. “I always sort of thought you would never like me back.”

Marinette’s head whipped up. “What? Why?”

“Because… you’re Ladybug. It’d be weird for you to waste time with someone like me when you could do so much better.” He scratched the back of his head. “Actually… I still can’t get my head around it.”

He smiled at her. Marinette’s heart twisted.

“I’m never wasting time with you, Adrien. I love being with you.” She placed her hand on top of his and searched for his eyes. “You know that, right?”

He looked at her for a minute. “Yeah, I do,” he said. “Thank you.”

Adrien didn’t look away, and neither did she. Marinette felt her heart swell. There, sitting beside Adrien, his knuckles pressed against her palm, was what she could have had months ago. She wouldn’t give it up for the world, and she hoped he knew that as strong as she felt it. She squeezed his hand for good measure. They spent too long fighting for one another to give it all up.

“Well,” she said, and smacked her knees decisively, “I should probably keep tidying up.”

“Actually,” Adrien pulled out his phone, “I have a better idea.”

Marinette turned around, eyebrow raised, then quickly turned back at a sudden flash of light. Her vision refocused; Adrien was pointing his phone camera at her.

“What do you think you’re doing?” she asked, and pushed it away.

“Maybe I want to have pictures of you all over my room, too.”

Her eyes widened. “No.”

He got his phone ready again. “Yes.”

Marinette scrambled to her feet, and held out her hands in a defensive stance. “No, Adrien, I look so bad in photos!”

“Come on, My Lady, you’re the prettiest girl I know!”

“ _ Adrieeen _ —“ She was interrupted by a camera shutter. “Stop it!”

Truly, almost none of the photos he took were printable, not with how fidgety Marinette was. 

But there was one. 

It was a few hours later, after she had tidied her whole room. She fell asleep lying in his lap, her hair falling over her cheek, holding his hand, and he had to turn his ringer all the way down before taking her picture.

Adrien may have not covered his room with it, but he made a note to buy a picture frame big enough for his bedside table on the way home.


End file.
